VANCOUVER -- The Heffel art auction got off to a rousing start early Wednesday afternoon at the Vancouver Convention Centre when the event’s first and only million-dollar sale came only minutes into the bidding.

On top of the “hammer price” buyers paid for their pieces is an 18-per-cent “buyer’s premium” as well as applicable taxes, and the total bill must be paid in full within seven days, warned auctioneer David Heffel, before the bidding began.

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The $1.1-million sale of Pleine Saison by Jean Paul Riopelle, a large mosaic-like canvas that he painted in 1954, brought the auction’s first round of applause after a prolonged bidding war between at least four serious buyers. The 162 centimetre-wide piece was painted with a palette knife in overlapping hues and textures and had been expected to fetch between $400,000 and $600,000. The sale went to a telephone buyer.

“Fine painting, fine price,” said Heffel, before moving on to the next lot.

Kimono by Kenneth Danby, dated 1987-88, was another of the auction’s key early sales. The realist painting, depicting a woman standing beside the ocean, her kimono-draped figure reflecting on the wet sand below her feet, sold for $100,000, a world record price for a work by Danby, said Heffel.

Robert Heffel took over the hammer from brother David a few lots before bidding began on a 163 centimetre-tall abstract piece Temple, 1972, by Jack Hamilton Bush. The simple, bold work is comprising three bright, strong bars of blue, pink and orange over an earthy yellow and orange background, and had been expected to take as much as $175,000 at auction.

“It’s only money,” said Robert Heffel as he pressed the bidders to the final sale price of $375,000, more than twice its high estimate.

“It’s like pulling teeth,” he joked, before adding that the sale was a Canadian record for a Bush piece.

Among the few sculptures that sold was Joe Fafard’s Boxer Table, a bronze coffee table that features a pair of boxers doing battle in the middle of a ring. The piece was one of three Fafard made in 1986 and fetched $30,000.

Fafard’s other sculptures in the auction, including two of horses and one of a sitting bull each went below or at the low end of the pre-auction estimates.

Total sales for the first half of the auction, covering Canadian postwar and contemporary art, were valued at $4.6 million, Robert Heffel said in an interview. That was far more than the auctioneers had estimated.

Those pieces were followed by 74 lots of fine Canadian art, including the evening’s anticipated big-ticket item, a small but exquisite Lawren Harris painting, Lake Superior Sketch LXI. Painted between 1926 and 1928, it features the classic Harris image of a dead tree standing tall in a streamlined landscape with lake, mountains and sky. The painting sold for $825,000, just a little over its estimated value.

A similar oil sketch by Harris, The Old Stump, had sold for $3.5 million in 2009, a record sale at a Heffel auction.

Other key pieces included A.J. Casson’s Country House in Winter, circa 1940, which went for a relative steal at $140,000.

Emily Carr’s Trees in a Swirling Sky, circa 1939, sold for twice its estimated price, bringing in $500,000. Many other Carr pieces did similarly well, in some cases outselling their estimates four-fold.

One of the most competitive bidding wars was over A.Y. Jackson’s Mazinaw Lake, March, Bon Echo, 1924, a painting of a granite cliff rising from a lake that had been placed at a value of as much as $175,000.

After interest among those present in the auction room waned around $200,000, a pair of telephone bidders boosted the selling price to a whopping $525,000.

Before the turn of the millennium, just one Canadian artwork had sold for one million dollars or more, said Robert Heffel. Since that time, more than 60 Canadian pieces have sold for a million dollars or more, and about 40 of them were sold by the Heffels, he said.

“Any time you break one million dollars it’s always exciting,” said Robert Heffel.

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